You can pick out some major weather events — Katrina, floods, different major fatal hurricanes — from the chart, but the most interesting one is definitely lightning deaths.

While the other systems are generally sporadic, lightning fatalities have declined.

There are a couple possible interpretations, but the one that seems the most credible is vastly improved meteorological predictive abilities, which giving people more notice of dangerous storms.

More instruction on how to stay safe in a thunderstorm, less time spent outdoors, or safer buildings could also contribute to the drop, but nothing has improved so drastically since the forties as weather prediction systems, radar and communication paths.